Following her husband’s death, grieving widow Abby (Jaimi Paige) journeys into the forest he loved to scatter his ashes, accompanied by her teenaged son (Toby Nichols) and her best friend Jen (Alyshia Ochse). As they wander the wilderness and reminisce, they’re struck by a rising feeling of dread: they are not alone. A mysterious, silent stranger in sunglasses — The Hiker — is stalking their every move. Suddenly, they find themselves the hunted prey in a deranged killer’s terrifying game. The nerve-shredding feature debut from Sam Patton will make you think twice before venturing into the woods.

Desolation is another one of those more slow-moving character driven horror films that we’ve seen in more recent times. This one takes a mother and her son after the death of his father on a hiking and camping trip with her best friend as they are stalked by a strange man who wears shades. Oddly enough, the dude turns out to be the film’s bad guy and looks like a Dollar General version of Rob Zombie. Which I admit is an odd look for the dude and I’m not sure it helps the case of the movie in general when the most memorable thing about it turns out to be how awkward the baddie in the film looks. None the less, things happen very slowly and soon enough we have people trying to survive this ordeal in the woods.

Like you’d expect in a movie like this, these folks do dumb stuff and end up in a bit of a jam, but it isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before. The film could have used more characters because this is a movie in desperate need of a body count. I can appreciate character development as good as the next guy, but this movie needs a little something more than what it packs to help keep you interested in what is going on. I feel it would have been better served as a full-on slasher movie than what it ends up being. It also hurts things when you really don’t care what happens to the characters here one way or another, and the movie builds them up and we still don’t really care. It looks nice, but I was a bit disappointed in it.